The Long Commute

Northeast Airlines Flight 258 left New York's La Guardia Airport at 10:30 p.m., its 31 passengers chafing at the two-hour delay already caused by lowering weather. Along with the usual vacationers were passengers who had locked up their office desks for the weekend, eaten hasty meals, packed their bags and hurried to make Flight 258 at its scheduled time. They had little time for delay; they were weekend aerial commuters, a modern phenomenon, traveling regularly from their workweek jobs in New York to their New England summer homes. Flight 258 wheeled northeasterly from La Guardia, headed toward Nantucket Island, only 68 air-minutes away.

Forty minutes off Nantucket, Pilot John Burnham, 37, checked for a weather report with Cape Cod's Otis Air Force Base. He got welcome word: visibility at the island was four miles, with scattered clouds at 12,000 ft. Burnham zeroed in on Nantucket--and ran into one of the island's murky flash fogs, rolling in from the sea with bewildering speed. Burnham, using Nantucket's Visual Omni Range beam, prepared for an instrument approach. But the fog thickened until even VOR was ineffectual. With its field socked in, Nantucket tried to warn the Convair by voice radio--and could not reach it. Flight 258 came in for its landing, flying low over scrub pines. It plowed into the ground 600 feet to the left of the runway. Dead when the wreckage was cleared were 23 of the 34 people aboard, including onetime (1950-53) Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Gordon Dean, 52, a senior vice president of General Dynamics Corp., a work-week summer bachelor, commuting weekends by air to Nantucket and his waiting wife.

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